Have you heard of the “seed?” A seed is a little
tiny thing, about the size of a sesame seed. In fact, I think the seed and the
sesame seed have similar etymological roots.

This little technological wonder works like this: you take
the seed, you put it in some special dirt called “soil,” you sprinkle
it with water and a few weeks later you have a cabbage or some broccoli or a
carrot or something. It’s amazing. They call this technology “farming.”

Who came up with that? Was it Steve Jobs? It must’ve been.

Actually, although it sounds like the latest high-tech
gizmo, the seed has been around since before anyone can remember. Farming
wasn’t invented by Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, it was invented by farmers
thousands of years ago.

There have been some improvements. For example, back when
cotton was the biggest crop in the southern United States, it caused a big
problem. Cotton drew so much nutrition out of the soil that farmers ended up
going out of business. Then George Washington Carver got farmers to grow
peanuts to help the soil recuperate.

George Washington Carver was the Steve Jobs of his time, I
guess, huh? Maybe, except accumulating obscene wealth was not a priority for
George. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison both offered Carver huge salaries to work
for them, because he was such an inventive guy. But even after becoming an
international celebrity Carver continued to work at the Tuskegee Institute as a
member of the all-black faculty teaching a black student body. He made about
$1500.00 a year.

Though back then a lot of people considered Carver’s
commitment to his people, who had early in his own lifetime been freed from
slavery, to be noble, I guess today he’d be called a “chump.”

There’s an attitude today among the über-wealthy that
money-accumulation itself somehow contributes to the well-being of society. How
exactly these self-appointed model citizens have convinced themselves of their
own sainthood is something of a mystery. Poets and philosophers have long
remarked on the ability of we human beings to award ourselves laurels and blind
ourselves to our own shortcomings, but the persistence of grotesque
self-deception among the over-privileged continues to mystify.

How does a class which gains most of its income from the
manipulation of paper assets come to call themselves “the makers” and
the rest of us stupid enough to actually work for a living “the
takers?” Because these are their terms. Not every obscenely wealthy person
thinks this way, I suppose, but a large enough majority of them do, and they
don’t really have to fight a barrage of rhetorical rebuttal in order to do it.
So let me speak directly to them for a moment:

Hello, Makers. I’m sorry the rest of us have been such a
disappointment to you lately. It’s obvious we aren’t holding up our end of the
social contract, or we wouldn’t be hurting so badly economically. But let me
make an observation.

You would like, I’m sure, an educated, ambitious and
inspired would-be restaurateur to open a nice little place for you to eat. But
the percentage you draw from all points of his possible revenue stream has
grown too large for him to make it anymore - from the rent he’ll pay on the
brick-and-mortar location, from the raw materials he’ll use as ingredients,
from the fuel he’ll use to power his transportation and his ovens, from his
advertizing, even his ambience - you, the top-tier shareholders in the
financial siphoning machine, are taking too big a cut at every step in the
process.

And all down the line, prices of everything have to rise to
compensate for your exacting your dividends.

When you shortchange the rest of us on our share of the
profits, when worker productivity can go through the roof without wages rising
at all, you create poor people whom you then condemn for needing public
assistance. It’s an Ixion’s wheel of your own hypocrisy, lack of awareness, and
sense of entitlement to which you’ve strapped the rest of society.

And where, built into this amazing economic system, is the
incentive for you to shrink your cut? Where is the pressure for you to increase
wages and drain less fluid from the economic blood supply? You’ve demonized
unions and all but destroyed them. You’ve bought influence over politicians who
might otherwise be persuaded to legislate a less destructive divvying of
resources. And with your think tanks and media domination you’ve crippled
public discourse on economics to the point where workers and poor people who
talk about increasing, let alone strive to increase, their share of the wealth
of society are considered parasites or socialists at worst, probably motivated
by jealousy of the rich or at best manipulated by misguided do-gooder elitist
intellectuals.

You’ve even destroyed your own ability to think in a less
socially irresponsible way, having propagandized yourselves into believing
you’re entitled to every cent you can wrest from the collective human
enterprise because you are the best part of it.

In today’s belief system, power is meant to be used, the
truly brilliant person of power uses it to its fullest potential, and there is
no moral reason for restraint. In fact, restraint is the hallmark of the fool.
Failure to extract every possible advantage from a situation is considered a
missed opportunity, even the result of laziness or sloppiness. The only virtue
is winning, and the bigger the win the more virtuous the winner.

And now some of you even want to take credit for the seed.
Not satisfied with relegating the farmer to anonymity, you want to take credit
for the creations of Nature herself.

This isn’t working out. It’s impossible for us down here to
see the actual good you do, if you indeed are doing any, because you’ve
separated yourselves from the rest of us behind a shroud of financial
mysticism. While you’re fooling yourselves into thinking you’re doing all the
work, we’re down here not seeing anything but the wreckage we have to sweep up
and rebuild from.

And because we must rebuild - believe it or not, a living is
not something created by a wealthy person, it’s something fostered in a
community of people who rely on each other - we will rebuild. And once we have,
we may arise with a slightly different idea than yours as to who are the makers
and who the takers.

You own stuff. Mostly you own legal instruments for
channeling money into your pockets. You didn’t invent the seed. No one did. You
didn’t invent peanut butter. More to the point, you don’t farm. You don’t tend
to the sick. You haven’t committed your lives to lifting your people out of
poverty. And those kinds of things still need doing. And doing those things is
what an economy is. Get over yourselves.

This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!

Notice: The copyright on these essays will only be invoked if someone besides Jeff Dorchen tries to make a profit with them or uses them without giving Jeff credit.

Venture over to Curioglyphs. I’m a multimedia artist. Curioglyphs is my attempt to organize and display my creative output. Take a little explore, why not?

About The Moment of Truth

For years I, Jeff Dorchen, have been spouting my insightful social critiques on the radio show This Is Hell every Saturday morning on WNUR 89.3 FM, Chicago's sound experiment. The texts of those commentaries, collectively titled The Moment of Truth, appear here courtesy of my delightful friend Michael, who is in no way responsible for their content in the sense that, if you get mad, get mad at me and not him. Or get mad at yourself. Or your boss. Or über-capitalist/pseudo-republic conjoined-twin oppressors.

Clash of Civilizations, November 17

Since the beginning of human understanding, there has been human misunderstanding. Today we celebrate the timeless xenophobia between peoples as Clash of Civilizations. Best celebrated by invading or being invaded, terrorizing or being terrorized, especially across divides of two or more major world religions.

What are you lookin’ at?

Fun Fact: The Scythians used the scalps of their enemies as tickets to sporting events, particularly horsemanship and archery contests. Some enterprising Scythians would hoard scalps to be sold to those who wanted to get into the events at the last minute after they were sold out. These late-comers’ scalps were sold for a much higher price than that for which they were originally purchased. This is where we get the term to gyp, or Jew someone, into paying too much money for a scalp.